When I filled this out myself in July, I was "somewhat unlikely"
If you ask me again now, only a few months later, I'm probably leaning towards "Somewhat likely".
Insane how fast this space is moving.
Can you be more specific about what isn't just a growing pain/maturity problem that will eventually be baked into the default products once the unit costs come down?
I can one-shot full video production that takes almost an hour on claude right now and it'll run ffmpeg for a good chunk of that. I don't see how the delegation + infra isn't a solved problem a couple years from now.
I've watched the robots become better/faster software developers than I ever was over the last year. I've got a lifetime of esoteric knowledge that's completely obsolete now. I can ask robots to do things, but so can any other random person.
What, exactly, do you think we are going to be prompting these things to do? And why would anybody pay us to do that, rather than just prompt them directly?
It is indeed neat that LLMs with fancy agent harnesses can write code very well at this point, but that doesn’t mean the average person can think through problems in the way that is required to build software that operates at meaningful scale with complex trade-offs and architecture decisions to be made. In my experience with others in other fields, that is not a common skill, and I really don’t see how an LLM is going to solve that.
For this reason, I do not see software engineering going anywhere, but I do believe it is possible/likely there will be negative changes in hiring and wages.
It was pretty clear even 2 years ago. Now it's happening right on schedule.
By human programming I mean humans typing code.
Obviously the models themselves have trended bigger since which has helped and also just the tooling and harnesses around it and the models being trained for that use case has achieved a lot since that q4 2025 window which is about the first time it became functional for me.
There was so much low hanging fruit back then in terms of training.
LLMs can write code. What they can’t do is build systems based on vague desires from business people. Because nobody can, you need to distill and refine nebulous ideas into technical requirements and design. And that’s what engineers do.
I also think this is inherently a human endeavor. It’s about relationships and understanding. LLMs can’t accomplish this because they don’t have the political power or the ability to push back. And we probably don’t want them to have that power.